The 'weak' sound of the guitar and Andrés Segovia being its 'attendant'

The article examines a contradiction: the guitar, an instrument with a low sound level, achieved an unprecedented spread in the concert hall with Andrés Segovia. It argues that twentieth-century urbanisation, which flooded the listener with loud sounds, made them more ‘vulnerable’ to soft music and to silence, which avant-garde composers used as a means of expression. The limits of volume drove Segovia to bring out timbre and the plasticity of tempo in interpretation, while technological progress, with nylon strings, the 78 rpm record and the aeroplane, gave him a ‘voice’ and a wider audience. Finally, the article links the role he assumed, as the ‘father’ and ‘attendant’ of the guitar, to the absence of his parents from his childhood.